Matt Liston, the former CEO of Augur, has founded a blockchain religion called 0xΩ (pronounced Zero Ex Omega). While it appears to be a new way to “incentivize mindshare,” Liston is serious when he calls his initiative a new religion. However, he sees himself as neither a “cryptoprophet” nor a “Cryptsiah,” not least because he was raised as a Jew.
Interestingly, Liston’s project is not the only Ethereum-based cult. As you will see below, you can now invoke demons with smart contracts.
Even though he may have launched the first blockchain-based religion, Liston is honest and says he doesn’t have any divine knowledge. He told Business Insider:
“It makes me uncomfortable to think about that. It seems inappropriate. If I'm claiming to start a religion, it's probably disingenuous if I claimed not to be a figure within the religion. But I don't like the sound of that.”
Along with artist Avery Singer, Liston presented his new project in May at New Museum in New York. He said his religion represents a distributed ledger technology (DLT) system for pre-established cults as well as an independent and new faith-based order. Singer joined the new religion by creating artwork that has the status of iconography, with a computer-generated imagery art piece likely becoming the first sacred object. She hinted that the circulation of this CGI art piece might be viewed as a form of prayer some day.
“We have this avatar I've created who is a narwhal with a doge head, a beret, tattoos, an infinity tail, an Ethereum logo,” she said during the event.
Liston explained that the goal of the project is to incentivize mindsharing and eventually mind upload to apply blockchain-based consensus in creating a model of collective consciousness.
“And then, we'll elevate an individual interaction with a religious structure as a group participation in a collective consciousness where the structure itself is god,” he said.
The former head of Augur said he was inspired by the similarities between religious belief and the almost evangelical zeal often seen in the cryptocurrency community. According to Liston, the project revolves around the use of DLT to support artists the way the Catholic Church has supervised art projects in the past. He admitted to being bored with the dominance of finance people and developers in the crypto space.
0xΩ will have its own token called Omega, and the project has already produced a white paper that it refers to as “flame paper.”
Besides co-founding and running Augur, Liston was a chief security officer at Gnosis, another blockchain-based market prediction platform. Interestingly, “gnosis” is the Greek word for “knowledge” and is often used in religions and philosophies to express mystical and divine knowledge.
In case you’re bored and consider jumping into Liston’s new religion, it might be a good idea to explore his inclinations. Based on a Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) account that seems to belong to him, we can see that he liked a book called “Dark Glamor: Accelerationism and the Occult,” which is presented as a “2 volume collection of essays addressing the relationship between accelerationism and occulture.”
It might also be relevant to mention Liston’s music preferences, which gravitate around artists and songs that can be described as experimental, electronic, explicitly occult, and sometimes even satanic. In other words, fare that may be deemed quite weird by the general public.
Musician Cullen Miller has also initiated an occult project on Ethereum. Last month, he published the so-called “Claves Angelicæ,” which is “an installation and procedural system that enables a participant to inscribe a magical Word onto the Ethereum network.”
The process has seven steps: initiation, banishing, logos, incantation, seal, casting, and sigil.
If you thought blockchain is some innovative technology with very new principles, you might be wrong. According to Miller’s presentation:
“Although the blockchain space is largely secularized, the principles of the Ethereum network is a manifest dream of the ancient magi. Magicians are the original cipherpunks. Solidity, Serpent, and LLL are grimoires (Latin ‘grammaire’) or books of magical grammar. Smart contracts are daemons invoked to enact our Will. DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) are archons governing and managing resources from the Ether. Pentacles are cryptographic tokens for binding daemons and storing value.”
So, if you want to use Ethereum smart contracts to invoke demons to do your bidding, now you apparently have the opportunity to do it.
This is not the first time “magicians” have interfered with the crypto space. In February, a Russian weirdo sect led by the creator of cryptocurrency Prizm conducted a bizarre ritual to end the Fed and the US dollar domination.
This article appeared first on Cryptovest
